CIA chief: Waterboarding aided bin Laden raid

If you haven’t read this piece by Dan McLaughlin, consider it your must read of the day.For the past 48 hours, lefties have been falling all over themselves and contorting themselves in knots to downplay enhanced interrogations and the role waterboarding might have played in getting Bin Laden.One of the most humorous contortions came from Spencer Ackerman, a lefty hack who has taken one of my favorite blogs and destroyed it with mindless nonsense and leftwing talking points that grossly distort and distract from the awesomeness that had been Wired’s Danger Room blog.To Ackerman, waterboarding had nothing to do with getting Bin Laden. Never mind that his post conflicts with his premise — it is standard leftist trope that waterboarding can never, ever get anything useful and should never be done because it is torture.Last night, on the NBC Nightly News, CIA Chief Leon Panetta blew more holes in the anti-waterboarding arguments and denials than were put in Osama Bin Laden’s head.

Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.”Enhanced interrogation techniques” were used to extract information that led to the mission’s success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.Panetta, who in a 2009 CIA confirmation hearing declared “waterboarding is torture and it’s wrong,” said Tuesday that debate about its use will continue.”Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question,” Panetta said.

As Dan noted yesterday, it seems some of the information came after waterboarding and not during a waterboarding session. But, to say one had no relation to the other is to leave “with is the contention that when a guy confesses to the good cop, that means the bad cop was not a factor in anything that followed (the phrase “fruit of the poisonous tree” may ring a bell to some lawyers).”Exactly right.